this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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While shifting to Rust might be a good idea for improving safety and performance, adopting the MIT license represents a fundamental change that will enable large tech companies to develop and distribute proprietary software based on the new MIT-licensed Core Utilities. This shift moves away from the original vision of the project which was to ensure that the software remains free and open as enshrined in the GPL's copyleft principles. The permissive nature of the MIT license also will increase fragmentation, as it allows proprietary forks that diverge from the main project. This could weaken the community-driven development model and potentially lead to incompatible versions of the software.
Open source has been captured and corporatized.
But Ubuntu has always been extremely corporate.
Do large tech companies contribute a lot to the GPL coreutils?
Yes, they do. The GPL's copyleft clause requires companies to release the source code of any modifications they distribute, ensuring contributions back to the community. The MIT license, however, allows proprietary forks without this obligation. In other terms, the MIT license is effectively permitting companies to "jump out" of the open-source ecosystem they make use of.
I know, but do they? Has big tech contributed to the code base significantly for coreutils specifically? sed and awk or ls has been the same as long as I remember, utf8 support has been added, but I doubt apple or google was behind that.
As far as I’m aware, contributions from major corporations to GNU Core Utilities specifically (e.g. sed, awk, ls) have been limited. Most development has historically come from the GNU community and individual contributors. For example, UTF-8 support was likely added through community efforts rather than corporate involvement. However, as these corporations increasingly back projects moving away from GNU and the GPL, their intent to leverage the permissive nature of the MIT license becomes evident. Should 'uutils' gain widespread adoption, it would inevitably lead to a significant shift in governance.
Intel does a lot, by which I mean they sponsor people to do it. Changing user facing utils is a bad idea as it breaks things. Although I don’t really keep up with it I know they’ve been changing things like the number of levels of pages etc, over time moving to sysd instead of init and stuff but the latter was a decade ago now. You can probably trace the maintainer to who sponsors them from here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history
Kernel yes, but coreutils? It's ls, sleep, who, pwd, and so on.
If this happened, would Ubuntu based operating systems be impacted as well? I might start to learn Debian or LMDE if so.
MIT license is still open source, so Ubuntu based operating systems can still be open source. The problem is that this makes it less needed that they have to be. However most current projects will probably stay proper open source projects and likely continue to use a better license.